From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!torn!utgpu!utcsri!rpi!usc!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!tdat!swf Tue Jun 23 13:21:06 EDT 1992
Article 6300 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: swf@teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: 5-step program to AI
Message-ID: <493@tdat.teradata.COM>
Date: 17 Jun 92 22:51:31 GMT
References: <1992Jun16.213227.31307@mp.cs.niu.edu> <60835@aurs01.UUCP>
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Reply-To: swf@tdat.teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
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In article <60835@aurs01.UUCP> throop@aurs01.UUCP (Wayne Throop) writes:
|
|John Nagle mentions that "Currently, we seem to be in the insect-level
|AI era.". I think the "richness" distance between "bugs" and frogs is
|smaller than that between frogs and dogs, but I wouldn't be surprised
|to be wrong about this.  So I wouldn't be uncomfortable with going along
|with "insect-level" as a better intuitive characterization than
|"frog-level".

Well, speaking as a biologist, I tend to see the differences between
frogs and insects as mostly one of engineering 'style' - insects use
a distributed computing architecture (segmental ganglia), and implementation
of algorithms by means of local connectivity, frogs use a centralized
computation architecture (a brain) with algorithms implmented via neuronal
projection fields.  Both are largely 'instinctual' (pre-programmed), and
'reflexive' (few computation steps between stimulus and action).

So, yes, they are roughly at the same level.
|
|Or maybe better still (since I think of the difference between chimps
|and humans as more of a matter of degree than the difference between
|chimps and rodents) (especially if one takes Koko seriously):

I don't, too much of the Koko results are subject to 'wishful thinking'
effects (i.e. they are not sufficiently double blind).

|   entity       extra capability compared to previous entity
|   ------       --------------------------------------------
|   rock         none
|   germ         stimulus response               algorithmic programs
|   bug          "contentless' object modeling   current AI
|   rat          "rich" object modeling          future AI
|   ape          abstract symbol use             TT-passing ability
|
|The above table, of course, is much more precise-seeming than it
|"ought" to be.  The boundaries between these "levels" or "stages" are
|much fuzzier than they seem here.

I would go beyond fuzzy - I see no discernable boundries amoung most of these,
except between rocks and living things.

Of course that does not make such scales useless, the Centigrade scale
is quite useful even without any clear 'boundries' between different
temperatures.

|We can also add, beyond "ape":
|
|   entity       extra capability compared to previous entity
|   ------       --------------------------------------------
|   god          omniscience                     oracle for true sentences
|                                                of formal systems
|Or maybe we can't...
|


Cute.
-- 
sarima@teradata.com			(formerly tdatirv!sarima)
  or
Stanley.Friesen@ElSegundoCA.ncr.com


